There are collections of multiple computers, commonly referred to as data centers, server farms, or deployments. It is common in these deployments to have one or more management systems that monitor and manage multiple computers (either physical computers or virtual machines (VMs)) in a deployment. For instance, a management system may manage patching the computers, standing up a computer—including installing applications on the computer, and instantiating those applications (such as a MICROSOFT Server App-V application virtualization package, or a MICROSOFT Database Application Components description of a database)—or monitoring the health of the computers. Such a management system may manage a computer by interacting with a corresponding management agent on the computer.
Furthermore, it is common for multiple computers of a deployment to be homogenously configured. Computers may be homogenously configured, for instance, where they are configured to execute the same version of an operating system, or they are configured to execute the same versions of applications.
One way that administrators configure computers to be managed by management programs is as follows. An administrator orders the computers, receives them, mounts them in racks, installs program code on each from a disc, and then registers each computer with one or more management systems that will manage the computer. Apart from some of the details involving the physical machines themselves, an administrator may configure the VMs in a deployment to be managed by management programs in a similar way. There are many problems with these known techniques for configuring VMs in a deployment to be managed by management programs, some of which are well known.